Emilia Clarke and Dr. Bennet Omalu on Brain Health and Resilience

Announcer: From Salesforce Studios, this is Blazing Trails.

Matt Jaffe: Welcome to Blazing Trails, the newly rebooted Blazing Trails where we bring you conversations with leaders who move us, inspire us, and make us think. I'm Matt Jaffe, Senior Director here at Salesforce. To start off this show, we are going to bring you some of the best conversations from Dreamforce, all presented by WordPress VIP. Today, Emilia Clarke, who many of you know, I'm sure, from her role as Khaleesi on Game of Thrones. What you might not know is her personal story- two brain aneurysms that left her fighting for her life just as her star was rising. So now, here she is, take a listen to Emilia Clarke on stage at Dreamforce with Dr. Bennet Omalu.

Speaker 3: So ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Dr. Bennet Omalu and Emilia Clarke.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you. Thank you. Awesome.

Speaker 3: Thanks.

Emilia Clarke: Great.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Thank you so much for having us.

Emilia Clarke: Yes, it's like we're feeling very calm. Very zen.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: What an honor for me to be sharing the stage with Emilia.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you, guys, thank you.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: I don't know how many of you know about me. I'm not ashamed to say it, all my life I struggled with depression and low self- esteem. Just last week reading about Emilia, I was so much inspired by Emilia's story. I deeply want to thank you for what you've done for me.

Emilia Clarke: Oh, thanks.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: In the next 45 minutes, I believe she will do a lot more for you. I'm very honored to be here with you, and I'm thankful.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you, likewise.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Thank you. Now let me ask you, by a raise of hands, how many of you have heard of SameYou? Oh, quite-

Emilia Clarke: They were listening to the intro. That's good. Is it up on the-

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Quite a good number. So my objective this morning is that after 45 minutes, you would all visit the website SameYou. org, see what it's all about, and help Emilia to help all of us. I've examined over 12, 000 brains and bodies, I talk to the dead, and we all are members of one another. We are one common family. Whatever one person does, affects all of us. So one person can make a difference. Emilia is making a difference with her story. So to start, Emilia, could you share with us what your childhood was like? I knew you grew up-

Emilia Clarke: Should I be lying down, is that it?

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You grew up in Oxfordshire, in Oxford.

Emilia Clarke: I did, yes.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Could you tell us about that? You made up your mind at about three, four years old to become an actor.

Emilia Clarke: Yes.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: But your father wasn't too happy with you.

Emilia Clarke: No, no, no, no. I was three when I said I wanted to be an actor. I was pretty bloody- minded about it, I could say. My dad worked as a sound designer for the theater, so I think I was aware of what the world might be. But he was in the crew, so therefore he considered actors to be rather crazy neurotic. So it was my determination to be a non- crazy, non- neurotic actress, which, yeah, we're seeing how that goes. But yeah, I had a gorgeous childhood. It was idyllic, it was lovely. It was no health scares, no early signs of anything. I mean, when I was 14, I had a kind of intense migraine that lasted two days, which maybe, maybe, maybe we consider might be a pre- cursor to what I had. But that's not...

Dr. Bennet Omalu: When you were five years old, you had your first play in school.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You went to private school. And you got to the stage, you forgot your lines.

Emilia Clarke: Yes, completely fried.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: All your teachers were excited. What happened?

Emilia Clarke: Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's me, five years old, on the stage, having won this part and feeling very good about it, and probably about this amount of people were there, it was a big school, and conveniently forgot my lines, but seemed quite content standing on the stage just with an audience. Apparently that was enough, I didn't need to know the lines. I was very confident in just being on the stage. It felt, yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And you absorbed it all. You were not excited. You were not unsure. I know at some point you had said you were unphased.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, it was a weird thing. I think that's probably when my parents saw that I had a possibility of being a performer of some kind, because I seemed very at home with lots of people watching me. So that says a lot.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Yeah. Something about that, at that age, outwards, I had such a low self- esteem. I was so afraid of myself. And at such a young age, you took control of yourself.

Emilia Clarke: Well, I'm much better in front of this many people than I am in front of six. Six people at a dinner party makes me very worried. But this many people, somehow it all just becomes a bit more possible.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: But even at such a young age, you wanted to do things that had some level of purpose, some futuristic capacity that would enhance who you were.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, I mean, I wanted to be, I think I've always wanted, from a very young age, to be useful, to be helpful. I don't know, in my family dynamic, that's what I've always done. A way of being useful is, I think from a very early age I wanted to connect with people. That was always a really big desire of mine, and I realized then at five, or earlier or later, and then reaffirmed much later, the telling of stories was how I could do that, was how I could connect with people.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Good. You know how life stirs upon you. When you were a kid, you had some symptoms, like many other people, had some migraines, you even passed out sometimes, but that never gave you an inkling of what was to come.

Emilia Clarke: No. Well, I'm only little, you see, so I've got naturally low blood pressure.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Oh, yeah, okay.

Emilia Clarke: And then I would push myself incredibly hard from a... I've always been very diligent with my work. That was, you know, trying to not be a crazy neurotic actress, I thought if I worked really, really, really hard, then that would kind of counteract that from ever happening. So in drama school, I worked myself as hard as I could, and resulted in passing out sometimes, and lightheadedness, and blood pressure, and all of those things. But again, that's something, if you go to a doctor, you could check your iron, check this, check magnesium, check that you're drinking enough water, or drinking too much alcohol, or whatever it might be. So all of those kind of symptoms, I think, can be placed in a million other categories before you would ever think for one second to get a brain scan.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Yeah. Now, life was good for you. You were on Game of Thrones, as Daenerys.

Emilia Clarke: Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Thanks, thanks. There we go. Thanks.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And life was on an expressway, you were doing extra well-

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, it was busy. Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: ...until, I remember, February 11, 2011.

Emilia Clarke: 2011, that's exactly it, yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You woke up that morning, like each and every one at first, and what happened?

Emilia Clarke: Well, so this was season one, we had wrapped, and season one was a head spin and a half because I had seen a film camera once before filming Game of Thrones. Because I came out of drama school, had a year of lots of jobs, that was in non- acting jobs, and then was on the show, left. The reason why I'm saying this is because I was in a really high state of not anxiety, but kind of, there was a lot of energy. I was experiencing a huge amount of energy for the first time properly, and then went and did a bit of a press tour in America, another kind of complete I don't know where I am or what's going on. You guys just heard Deepak, I was so out of my body, I was so not in the present moment for such a consistent amount of time, and then woke up and was in the gym. As if that isn't bad enough, I then had a brain hemorrhage, so that just made it worse. I was exhausted. I remember very vividly being incredibly, incredibly tired, which after kind of everything that had been happening to me in the previous year, it sort of seemed natural. But I pushed through it, and pushed through it, and pushed through it, and pushed through it, then was in the plank, and it was just the single most excruciating pain you could possibly imagine. I had a lovely personal trainer who was saying, " A headache doesn't seem like the right reaction to a plank. Maybe your abs should be hurting, your legs or whatever it might be, but not your head. That's remarkable." Then I started to feel incredibly ill, kind of crawled to the bathroom, and was being violently ill, really, really, violently ill. And for whatever reason, something I've read or something I had seen, I knew I was being brain- damaged. I don't know how. I mean-

Dr. Bennet Omalu: How did you know that?

Emilia Clarke: The combination of throwing up, and also the headache that... I mean, I've had migraines, it's migraines times 100. And I knew I was fighting a coma. I knew I was fighting slipping out of consciousness.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: What was going on in your mind?

Emilia Clarke: I was absolutely hellbent on not being a neurotic actress. That was pretty much it. It was just like, " No. No. This isn't even a question. That's not happening. I will absolutely not be brain- damaged. That's not an option. That's not happening to me today." So I was all the illness, and all the headache, and trying to move my fingers and my toes, and trying to think about my feet, and think about my legs, and make sure they were still working, and make sure that my arms were still working, and what's my full name, which is really long, and kind of has now, forever and a day, become this thing that I repeat to myself whenever I get, " Oh my God, I'm getting a headache. Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke." Almost as many as Daenerys. It's a theme.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: So you went into your hospital, somebody saw you.

Emilia Clarke: So yeah, there was a kindly person. I don't know who, I've never seen this person's face, because I couldn't kind of focus, and she called an ambulance. She heard me being ill, she took me out of the bathroom, put me in the recovery position, called the ambulance, then I'm in hospital and my parents are called, and they barely recognize me because I was in so much pain. You sort of become almost unrecognizable. And no one in the hospital knew what inaudible was, so I was unable to get any drugs to ease the pain because they can't treat anyone until they know what's wrong. So I was there for a number of hours in this hospital on a Saturday night, and then one of the nurses, her husband was a brain surgeon, and she said, " I think you need a brain scan. That's the kind of last thing, that maybe we should." Then they took me in for brain scan and saw that I had a huge amount of bleeding on the brain.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You know what happened each and every minute they waited at the hospital?

Emilia Clarke: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Your brain was undergoing some further injury.

Emilia Clarke: Yes.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Then a CT scan was eventually done.

Emilia Clarke: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And Emilia was told she had a brain bleed, a massive brain bleed, a subarachnoid hemorrhage from a ruptured blood vessel. We call it aneurysm. Now, to give you how serious this was, 40 to 60% of people who suffer ruptured brain aneurysms die. 40 to 60%. And when it ruptures, you bleed out, your blood vessels go into spasm, and cause further brain damage. But guess what? Emilia beat that.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: How did you do it?

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Ah, thank you, thank you very much. Thanks.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Remember, the child we were talking about, who was unphased, who was very reassured, who knew no fear. That all came to you when you were 20, with a ruptured brain aneurysm. How did you do that?

Emilia Clarke: Oh Christ, I don't know. I'm not very good as a person at kind of seeing a problem and not seeing a way through it. Genuinely, it's like a knee- jerk reaction. I need to learn to just let things be a little bit more. But with this, it was a purely instinctive thing. I was young, I was at the start of my career, I felt incredibly scared but optimistic and hopeful about what the future might look like. And so I suppose it's just a guttural reaction of not letting that... I fought, basically. I fought with every single fiber of my being. There was nothing to lose, and life to gain, literally. So that was the single thought that got me through. But then, the funny thing is, is when you're then in the operating theater and I had a successful operation that first one, and then you're there for three weeks going, " You want me to what? I've just got to sit here and feel awful, and I can't do anything anymore?" That's when the kind of fight that I had, that when it starts to kind of be put under scrutiny because then you're being asked to be present, you're being asked to kind of try and be okay with just healing. But luckily... I mean, I had something called dysphagia, which is pretty horrific. It's basically locked- in syndrome. So I woke up, and they wake you up every two hours when you're in intensive care, and this nurse wakes you up, and they say, " What's your full name?" As you've heard, it's quite a few. " And what date is it? Where are you?" Those kind of questions. This woman asked me, and apparently I came up with complete nonsense, and I knew. She asked me what my name was, and I couldn't say it, at all. That was way scarier. That was probably the single hardest thing because not being able to communicate, and as I said, kind of my whole reason for being as a human was to communicate and connect with people and tell stories, and in that moment I realized that I couldn't. That's something that people live with for much longer than I did. I had about three days of it. My mom was a complete hero. They obviously called my parents in, who were staying in a really, really, really awful hotel next to the hospital, and she came in, and I was obviously saying gobbledygook. I was kind of going in and out of consciousness of realizing that I wasn't making any sense, and then going through phases of just saying, " Fish and chips. Fish and chips. Fish and chips." Or whatever it might be. I mean, maybe I was hungry. Probably. My mom just looked at me when I was clearly not making any sense, and looked at me and went, "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally agree. Yeah, 100%. Right. Cool. What's next? Good point. Never heard that one before, that's interesting." So kind of made me feel like I was making sense. But anyway, they then took me back into the ICU, and I got a lot of adrenaline, and they did all that they could, because I was young I think. They normally see with strokes, obviously, people in an older generation than I was. I luckily came through that and was able to, but that's the only moment with the first brain hemorrhage that I just wanted to die. I had absolutely no reason in my mind to keep going.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: This is what really inspires me about you. When you became aphasic, couldn't speak, she was overcome with fear. You found yourself in this abyss of hopelessness.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Reading it, I stopped. You were not afraid of being afraid.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Okay? In spite of the hopelessness, there was something in you that gave you hope.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: In fact, while she was in ICU, in spite of her problems, you were aware of other patients in ICU.

Emilia Clarke: Well, yeah, that was in the second time when I was in ICU with the aphasia... I mean, in the ICU, people die there quite a lot, and when someone is dying, literally in that moment, they ask relatives who might be in the room to leave. So they asked my mom to leave, who was with me, and she said no, and I was incredibly, feeling pretty awful about hearing this and not really knowing what to do and not being able to communicate myself. And she just told me a story. She just told me a story.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: She told you a story?

Emilia Clarke: Told me a story about someone at work, because she knew I'd be interested in the gossip, and distracted me. It's good gossip. Good gossip. Stories. That's the bedrock of stories, it's just gossip. So she started telling me about this kind of gossipy story, and distracted me to the point where the person who was dying next to me, it stopped being something that could be my future, and began to be just simply the place in which we were in. And being able to be in hospital for that long, and being in intensive care, and I've now seen it three times, because I lost my dad so he was there as well, and being around human suffering, there is no greater way of making yourself feel lucky to be living and lucky for everything that you might have in that moment. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, those experiences.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You know what I tell people, I teach that you don't need to be afraid of who you are. You don't need to be afraid of fear. Embrace your fears, recognize your fears, but have the courage to overcome your fears, to turn them around, create value from your fears. I think that was exactly what you did.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, I mean I naturally have a lot of energy, and I think that's where the fight comes from.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Yes, yeah. And within one month from being released from the ICU, you went back to work to do a second season of Game of Thrones.

Emilia Clarke: Ooh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have three weeks in the hospital going, " I'm going to get a bath, I'm going to see daylight, I'm going to be outside," which becomes this amazing thing that you... there's not a huge amount of windows in a lot of the hospitals in England, anyway, where we were. All you want is fresh air, and all you want is your home. So then you finally leave, and it's a euphoric, gorgeous moment, and you get home, and you go, " What? Everyone's just been telling me for three weeks that I am going to die, that this is really serious, that I need to be really careful with myself." Not only that, but I... because it was a noninvasive surgery the first time, they went through the femur artery, and around the heart, and into your brain, and used copper coils to stop the bleeding. I looked completely fine, despite the fact that every car I got into, I banged my head, which was really infuriating. I got home, and I found a reason to go back to A&E that night. So the IV that I had been having for three weeks was a little bit infected. I mean, I needed an antiseptic cream, that was about it. But I made my loving family turn around and take me back to A& E. It wasn't because I was scared of my infected hand, it was because I was scared to be home. Which is ridiculous, because you spent three weeks dreaming of going home, and dreaming of having that... That, the essence of that is what recovery is, and the essence of that is what people have to live with day in and day out when you've faced death, and when you've been incredibly ill. It's not the thing that people immediately think of, is that when you get home you don't trust yourself, and you don't trust environment that has once felt familiar, and you resent the place that you've been, in the hospital bed, and it all feels very alien, and you're not sick anymore. But it's a real difficult one to get your head around. So a lot of fear, a lot of morphine to kind of get you through. Then, I think within about... I think I had about four weeks probably at home, and then continued doing promotion for season one of the show. But we couldn't tell HBO anything about it. We couldn't tell my new, fancy, American agents anything about it, until we knew I wasn't going to die. So when I came home, then I could say, " Funny story, I'm fine. I mean, I was out for a minute. Sorry not to provide you emails. I'm absolutely fine." Then it turned into this thing of me being a young actress that was insanely lucky to be there, inaudible. The only thing I was scared of was being fired, as opposed to being scared of the brain hemorrhaging.

Matt Jaffe: We are going to take a quick break now from that conversation with Emilia and Dr. Bennet Omalu to bring you some of my conversation with WordPress VIP CEO Nick Gernert. With unparalleled power and flexibility, WordPress VIP is the leading provider of enterprise WordPress, and they power digital customer experiences for companies like Facebook, Spotify, Capgemini, and more. In these next 10 episodes, you will hear from their CEO, Nick Gernert on how he and his company view the future of work, digital transformation, and much more. I know a lot about WordPress, familiar with what WordPress does, but WordPress VIP was new to me.

Nick Gernert: Yeah.

Matt Jaffe: What is it that sets WordPress VIP apart?

Nick Gernert: Yeah, so there is a lot of awareness around WordPress. We like to tout this stat. WordPress powers 35% of the top 10 million websites on the internet. It's probably 12 times bigger than the next closest content platform out there. It's just massive adoption. But we are WordPress VIP, which the simplest explanation for it is really we're enterprise WordPress. So when you think about WordPress, it probably creates certain mental models for you about what is WordPress. I've used it in web publishing, I've used it for personal endeavors around blogs, I've used it for a number of things. But WordPress VIP is really like, " Let's expand that to now think what are enterprises doing with this?" Because when we actually start to really narrow in on that particular segment, you have, within the to 10, 000 websites, like 26% of that still, so one in four, are powered by WordPress, even in like the fat part of the long tail on this. So really what we're focused on in WordPress VIP is let's create a great experience for the largest organizations, the most highly revered brands. Let's create a great experience on WordPress, let's build a platform that's really just laser focused on their needs, on what they're doing to engage with their customers. That's WordPress VIP.

Matt Jaffe: And you guys, you mentioned you're working with some major brands. I mean, you guys are working with Time Magazine.

Nick Gernert: Yes.

Matt Jaffe: One of my favorites. You guys have these incredible companies powered by WordPress VIP. What does that process look like for you guys, as you start to work with a company going from exploration all the way through planning, launch, growth? Take me through that process of working with some of these major companies.

Nick Gernert: Yeah. Time is a fun one. It's a great example. 2014, they launched on WordPress, so five years later, they're still going strong, doing really interesting things there. For folks in media, when we think about a publication like Time, there's so many factors that go into publishing for them that they just want to optimize for. Speed wins often in publishing and doing that. And really the approachability of the overall software is key in doing that. WordPress's ubiquity means that, in most cases, especially when we talk about like in journalism, folks have leveraged WordPress at some point in their career, and worked on these things. In organizations like Time is able to say, " We've taken WordPress, and then we've really uplifted it for our particular use case, when we're talking about dealing with massive libraries, content libraries, massive asset libraries, things like this." How does that start to then look for WordPress? So our process, and through that, is really helping people open their eyes to what's possible on the platform.

Matt Jaffe: The art of the possible.

Nick Gernert: Yeah, on this. So how do I take what's great about a highly approachable piece of software like WordPress, and say like, " How does that apply on my end?" That can be everything from overall total cost of ownership greatly reduced because you're using a platform that from novice to intermediate and even experienced users is incredibly approachable. You're reducing a lot of the time it takes to get people accustomed to the platform and actually doing their jobs. At the end of the day, you're really just trying to connect with the audience on the other end of that, and it's like, " Let's help you see that through a model that takes things that... " Often we'll walk into scenarios where folks are like, " It takes us seven different applications, and hours or days to assemble things," and we're like, " Put it into a single construct, 15 minutes max, you're out running with deep, rich, engaging content on that sort of thing." So we're in there deeply sort of analyzing what are the needs, what's the business trying to accomplish on this platform, how does WordPress really help fit into that, and how can we help them sort of see that vision and that dream through on the platform.

Matt Jaffe: That was Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP. To find out more about them, visit wpvip. com. Again, wpvip. com. Now, back to Emilia Clarke and Dr. Bennet Omalu.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You know something? I don't know how many of us may know it. When you're born, you're born with a certain number of brain cells, but your brain weighs about 400 grams. Then, you can only lose your brain cells. You cannot create new brain cells. The brain does not have any reasonable capacity to regenerate itself. So if you suffer any from a brain injury, that is it. It's permanent. You lose a brain cell, you've lost it. And Emilia went through a very severe type of brain injury.

Emilia Clarke: Maybe I had a few to spare.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Yup. And we, as physicians, we may have the best careful acute care. They go in, they clip the aneurysm.

Emilia Clarke: Yup.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: You had a second aneurysm and a second surgery.

Emilia Clarke: Yes. Yeah, yeah, which was much bigger.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: About two years later, right?

Emilia Clarke: Yeah. so I had mirror aneurysms, which is incredibly common. Because if you have the weakness, if you're born with a weakness on your arteries, your brain is then formed into the two sides, that weakness is mirrored. So the first one ruptured, as you just heard, and then they said, " There is second one. You need to keep an eye on it." So I was insanely, insanely lucky. I'm no- point- no percentile of people who have what I had without any repercussions, any mental, physical repercussions. I mean, they checked, and asked my family if I was just bad at math, and I am, so that was fine. It was like the only thing that they were slightly skewed on. So they said, " You've got this other one on the other side. Just keep an eye on it." Then I went back to work, a huge amount of fatigue, which is the main thing that happens universally when you have a brain injury. Regardless of what other physical repercussions you might have, fatigue is something you do suffer with, which is, it's just tiredness. But it's a kind of you physically can't stand up kind of tiredness, which as a young 20- year- old that's really infuriating when all of your friends are standing up until 4: 00 AM, and you're there going, "I just need a little sit- down." That brings with it, all of it, certain things. But they said keep an eye on it. So then two years later, I'm on a bad play on Broadway, and I'm coming to the end of my inaudible, so I thought I'd go and get a brain scan, which I was getting twice a year to kind of check on the other one. They said that it had doubled in size, the second one, and that I should go in and have the same procedure as I had with the first one in a preventative form so that nothing would happen. So I go in to do that, and I'm petrified, obviously, because you get a little kind of triggered by going back into hospital for the same thing. But I think, " Right, two hours, I'll come around and everything will be fine, and I'll go back to work, and that's all good." A number of hours later, I was brought round because the coils had got stuck, and I had had a much bigger bleed even than the first one, and they didn't know what to do. You know, operations go wrong. That does sometimes, don't get worried, sometimes happen. Not all the time, but just sometimes. And it happened, and they had to bring me around to ask me if it was all right to cut my head open. Obviously, I never thought I'd feel that pain again, and came around in the surgery, in the room, and was asked this question, and kind of was finding it difficult to speak anyway, but obviously gave it the AOK. My parents were there, and they couldn't do it for me. Luckily, for me, there was a surgeon who was lecturing very close, who was wonderful at cracking heads open and fixing them, because it's a different team that would do the calling, that would do the clamping. Then I was rushed into have that emergency procedure, and they're pretty sure I died for a minute, and then was brought back. That was a very complicated thing. Then to have miraculously made it, they were incredibly worried I had lost my peripheral vision, they were worried about a number of things that could have gone wrong as to where the bleed was on that side of my brain. And the thing about having tried both ways, I recommend the first because the physical trauma when your skull is cut open, plus the bleed, is then you're dealing with two different things. That was just horrific. That was just really, really awful.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: I know she may not want me to tell you, but she has got some titanium plate in her skull.

Emilia Clarke: I do. I don't set off alarms though. Handy.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: If I may ask you to share with all of us, what saw you through? What did you do? Because you're doing so well, you got back to your job. What did Emilia do?

Emilia Clarke: Well, the second time... I mean, I was raised to never say, " Poor me." I was raised to kind of, there's always someone who's much worse off, so just don't even give it a second to consider, " Oh, that's a bit rubbish for myself." But it was incredibly, incredibly difficult to not do that with this second one, because it's happened twice at this point. But I'm just pathologically hopeful as a human being.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Pathologically hopeful, did you hear that?

Emilia Clarke: I am. You know, I woke up every day, and i kept waking up every day, and there are a number of different things, my job being a really big one. The show, by that point, we were up to season three, so I knew I was coming back for season four. At least I think, I hoped I was coming back for season four. And I had, up until the age of three, invested so much of my hopes, and dreams, and wishes for myself, for my family, for the home that I had created. I had put so much into that, that not living to see it just, when the crunch time came, it wasn't an option to not fight for that.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: It wasn't an option, yeah.

Emilia Clarke: And it's the fight part of me that I think is probably the strongest. To kind of, to prove yourself wrong, to prove other people wrong, that you are strong enough to do it. That you might be 5'2" and a little English girl, but you're capable of overcoming this. I've been incredibly supported by the people that have been around me in my life.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Especially your mother, right?

Emilia Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She gets a lot of air time in this conversation. Yeah, let's give her a round of applause. Yeah, hells yeah. But yeah, it's the appetite for life, which has diminished at many points in my life, but at that point, at the crunch time, it does kind of come out to be stronger.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Thank you so much. Thank you. Going back to your permanent brain injury aspect of it. Sometimes, including myself, we are ashamed, we victimize ourselves by brain trauma. The unfortunate thing about brain injury is we don't see it.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: It's not like a fracture of the leg.

Emilia Clarke: It's an invisible disease, yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And they are usually persistent in terms, mood disorders, cognitive impairment, behavioral impairment, including drug abuse, impulsivity. Another, as you said, yours was a poor taste in men.

Emilia Clarke: That's what's gone. That's what we think is gone. Weirder coming out of his mouth, isn't it? Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: So how have you dealt with the long term-

Emilia Clarke: With the bad taste in men? That's another story. That's a different conversation. Christ. Excellent to have you all here.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: But how have you dealt with the long term effects of it?

Emilia Clarke: Well, with the second brain injury, and this is something that people do speak of, to speak of a lot when you've had a brain injury, I couldn't look anyone in the eye. The second time around, I was vaguely recognizable. I mean, I still had brown hair. I was not being stopped on the street maybe as much as I might be now. But it was the biggest fear I had throughout the recovery of the second one was being recognized. I mean, physically, I couldn't look my family in the eye, I couldn't look doctor's in the eye. I just wanted to disappear with everything that I had. I was alive, and I was fighting to be alive, but I was not ready to fight to be in the room and to look people... and to kind of give them that gaze. That comes from a complete lack of trust of yourself, because if you think about the brain really, it's whatever you hold as the thing that makes you you, the thing that makes you unique and individual as a human being. It's there. It's all housed in your mind. When that fails you... I mean, no one in this world has complete 100% confidence, and if they do, they're in a different sort of sphere. Without having that little bit of lack of self- belief, put on top of that, clinically, your body telling you that you're not good enough, your body telling you that you're not strong enough, that it has failed you, it's a kind of philosophical debate that you can have with yourself that makes you resistant to connect with any other human being, because you don't even know what's going on here. It's completely alienating, and entirely frightening, and leaves you feeling profoundly alone, because no one can see it, no one can understand it. If you break your leg, at least you're aware that that part of your body needs to be protected. With your mind, that takes care of everything, then there's no part of you that doesn't need to be protected, it doesn't need to be held close. If you're not supported in that process, you've got nothing. And it's incredibly frightening. I know that my dad went through phases of wondering whether I was left with a much more permanent problem, because I couldn't connect, I couldn't look anyone in the eye, and I couldn't have this. That was my biggest recovery process, was navigating my way through what that was. Now, I've rambled so much, I'm not sure if I've answered your question.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: No, no, no. Yeah, no. But if you noted, after the acute care, when you were having your problems, they went unnoticed by the medical industry.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: I sit on the California State Traumatic Brain Injury Board, and there's almost a complete absence of long- term care for people who have suffered brain injuries.

Emilia Clarke: Yes! Well, all of the funds goes into acute, and for a good reason, because we want to save people's lives. But the real thing that we don't realize is that the lives, the people who live after a brain injury, the rest of their lives, that's what we need to save. Because without Game of Thrones, without a loving supporting family, without the fight that I was naturally born with, without my pathological hopefulness and terrible taste in men, without all of those things, I wouldn't have been able to navigate my way through. And I wasn't a single mom with three kids and two jobs. That wasn't me. So I wasn't tested in that way. And if I was, you need support. That's the life that we're able to save in the recovery process, that is a completely white space, because there is really nothing.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: There's nothing. There's nothing.

Emilia Clarke: Absolutely. No, there's not a continual continuity of care. It just needs a human being checking with that person. It needs a human being who has the answers to your questions at 2: 00 in the morning when you go, " I've had a headache now for two hours and I think I'm having another brain hemorrhage. Am I going to die?" " No you're not. I can talk you through this." We can approach this from a different, more holistic way, which is what our charity is all about, is a mind- body- soul combination. It's with that, that hopefully we can start to give people a life that they recognize, or that they want to live.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: What Emilia has done, being the goodhearted person she is, the altruistic person you were, you were in the ICU struggling with your health, yet you cared about other patients. So this tells us who you were. And what she has done, actually, is to set up a foundation called SameYou, S- A- M- E- Y- O- U, SameYou, meaning in spite of brain injury, you still need to be who you are. And it's SameYou. org.

Emilia Clarke: Mm- hmm( affirmative), that's right.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: What she's done, believe me if I tell you this, in 1969 the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London established that when you suffer any from a brain injury, it is permanent.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And sometimes the same terms of the brain injury you suffered may take up to 42 years to manifest.

Emilia Clarke: Wow.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: So after your acute care until death, we almost have no systematic care for brain injury patients. Emilia wants to change that. And she is changing that. But she is asking for our help. She is asking for our help. Like I said earlier, we are one greater family, members of one another. What one person does affects all of us. So tell us about SameYou.

Emilia Clarke: Well, I mean, I don't know what the slides have been doing, but one in three of us will have a brain injury, which is a lot. It's a really big thing. It affects more people than... I think the statistics that we're coming up with now are they're underrepresented because people don't come forward about having had a brain injury. It also can affect the jobs that you might have, and all of these sorts of things. But it's a huge global issue that has nowhere near enough limelight. So what we're doing with SameYou is that we are trying to shine the light on recovery, on brain injury recovery, and largely for young people, obviously because it happened to me. And when it happens to a young person, just when you're trying to figure out what your life might look like, it changes forever. Without the guidance and support to be able to live the life that you hope and dream, and are hopeful that you might be able to live, then you've got nothing. We're eight months old. We're very young. And we have created a brand new, unique training program for nurses, which is the first of its kind because this kind of approach to recovery doesn't exist until now. Also, I did an inaudible campaign where I did a kind of Game of Thrones theme, dressed up as John Snow, it's very fun. I went through Times Square, it was very, very fun. That raised whopping million, which was amazing, and that has gone into a research center, Spaulding in Boston, and they are looking into brain resilience. So what are our brains capable of, especially in young people, after an injury, and how can we capitulate on that, basically. But the main thing that our charity would like to do now is we'd like to hear other people's stories. We want to bring together world leaders, and try and work out how to fix this problem globally, because it is a massive global issue that affects, like I said, lives, upon live, upon lives of people. So we're looking for people to come together with us and help us come up with the next wave of ideas as to how we can do that.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Another thing, as a patient of depression and low self- esteem, when people suffer from brain inaudible, there's usually a stigma that accompanies this of shame. People don't want to publicly talk about your problems, and even when you talk about their problems, they don't get the empathy they need.

Emilia Clarke: Yeah.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: So I think you're doing a phenomenal job.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: I'm deeply thankful you are using your platform to make a difference.

Emilia Clarke: Thanks.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Even if you were to make a difference, even in the life of just one person, you've done a wonderful job.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Thank you for that. I will pray for you, do what I could to help you.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: But please, please, it takes only one person. Visit SameYou. org, donate money if you don't have the time. If you have the time, give them your time. But we need to first change the mental attitude.

Emilia Clarke: Absolutely. We need to change the stigma. Bringing awareness to this massive problem would be an enormous step change in how we see it. So the more people that are able to be educated about it, which is what we're trying to do, and bring awareness to the problem, would be a huge step forward.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Wonderful. Now, I believe you've had some great information. It's been fun. When I travel around the world, I tell people that there is nothing like an impossibility. The impossible is meant to become possible. If you don't believe that, look at Emilia's life and story. Emilia came close to death twice, or three times, but she overcame it. I look at what she's doing with that experience, creating value from a negative experience. As they say, " Death, where lies your victory? Fear, where lies your victory?" So Emilia, we are deeply grateful.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: And thankful. SameYou. org, that is our take- home. SameYou. org. Empower Emilia, empower another human being, you shall empower yourself.

Emilia Clarke: Also, I am going to say this now, you can email me at SameYou. org. EmiliaClarke@SameYou.org.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Ladies and gentlemen, Emilia Clarke.

Emilia Clarke: Tell me your stories.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: Thank you.

Emilia Clarke: Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much.

Matt Jaffe: Thanks to Emilia Clarke and Dr. Bennet Omalu for that conversation. As a reminder, you can visit SameYou.org for more information on all of Emilia's efforts to support fellow survivors of brain injury and stroke. And thank you again to WordPress VIP for bringing you this episode. WordPress VIP, the leading provider of enterprise WordPress. To find out more, visit wpvip. com. If you liked today's show, we hope you'll subscribe, tell your friends, spread the word. There are lots more great conversations coming your way in the next few months. That'll do it for this week's Blazing Trails. We will be back with you next week with another highlight from Dreamforce 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook. Hope you'll join us then.

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